Thursday, August 3, 2017

Staunton, August 3 – Many people
accuse Vladimir Putin of destroying Russia, film director Andrey Konchalovsky
says; but instead “Russia has destroyed Putin” because like any Russian ruler,
he finds it hard “rule a state whose population has no idea about democracy … and
by according to inviolable tradition voluntarily delegates all power to one
single individual.”

What people need to
understand, Konchalovsky says, is that Russians are “an archaic nation, the
majority of its people live in the stone age even though they use i-phones. And
as far as [its] system of values compared to Europe, [Russians] are in the 11th
or 12th centuries when there was no bourgeoisie and no citizens.
Marx wrong about this.”

Russians “never had
property,” he points out, “and when an individual does not have anything that
he must defend or can sell, he cannot understand what a market economy is. As a
result, many Russians cannot understand Germans and Germans, Russians: there
exist different systems of priorities” and in fact a clash of “two
civilizations.”

And there is an additional problem: “Russian
thought is Manichean: there is only light and darkness, black or white. And
that is one of the reasons for the crisis-like development of our society.
Dialogue between the left and the right in Russia will never lead to
reconciliation or agreement.”

Asked
about his recent film, “The White Nights of Postman Aleksey Tryapitsyn,”
Konchalovsky says that he doesn’t view it as denigrating Russia in any way.
Instead, the film “simply shows the life of people whom [he] loves and who
however strange this may seem don’t suffer.”

Such people can’t be harmed by Western
sanctions, he says. “They have lived their entire life under sanctions. They
don’t run off in search of French camembert because it has suddenly disappeared
from the shelves of stores.” Instead, their response will be to become more
patriotic, and if a war begins, they will rally round the Kremlin.

“But when there is no war,” Konchalovsky
continues, “then the national idea will disappear into thin air.”

Asked to explain his statement that in Russia,
“everything is possible except reforms,” the director says that he “had in mind
successful reforms. We still haven’t cracked the Russian cultural code … the
German one is more understandable than [the Russian].”That is because the Russian is “a peasant”
while the German “from birth” is either a rural resident or a bourgeois.”

Compared to the bourgeois, “the
peasant has completely different qualities: he is always hostile to the state
because it constantly wants to take something from him. The West isn’t in a
position to understand this: The CIA in the 1990s thought that the situation
would lead to revolts of the hungry.”That
was “complete nonsense,” the director says.

“In Russia, there cannot be any
revolts of the hungry because Russians are always prepared for hunger. Their
patience is so great that they can survive injustice.” And that sets them apart
from the West. This is “a conflict of two civilizations” and between “such
different worlds, there will always be hostility.” The current round, he says,
is the West’s fault.

“The Western man will always be
afraid of the Russian,” Konchalovsky says, “even if there is nothing in him to
fear. But then he will drink vodka with him and everything will be fine.”